Thursday, September 26, 2013

Adam Kokesh and Jury Nullification

Adam Kokesh is an Iraq War veteran. He spoke out against the war and the left embraced him. He turned out to be a Libertarian and the left began attacking him. Not in this community. We still support Adam. He's currently in jail for making a video -- I'm not making that up.

We're all trying to rotate in taking turns noting his videos from jail. That's because we're trying to get the word out.

Thursday, September 26, 2013. Chaos and violence continue, Nouri buys
more weapons from the US, the Iraqi government should have no claim on
the Jewish archives the US has restored, the US counter-insurgency
program is plagued with theft and sexism and racism (what a proud moment
for American anthropologists), Samantha Power stinks up the room as she
grows excited over war on Syria, and more.

Starting with issues of cultural heritage. At the start of the month, the Washington Post reported on the Jewish archives the US rescued from Iraq in May 2003. The material was badly damaged and in need of restoring:

The material, found when U.S. troops invaded Iraq a decade ago,
includes a 400-year-old Hebrew Bible and a 200-year-old Talmud from
Vienna. There is also a small, hand-inked 1902 Passover Haggada, a
colorful 1930 prayer book in French and a beautifully printed collection
of sermons by a rabbi made in Germany in 1692.
The attention on the topic is due to the upcoming National Archives event. May 16th the National Archives (in the US) issued the following:Washington, DC…On Friday, October 11, 2013, the National Archives
will unveil a new exhibition, “Discovery and Recovery: Preserving Iraqi
Jewish Heritage.” The exhibit details the dramatic recovery of historic
materials relating to the Jewish community in Iraq from a flooded
basement in Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters, and the National
Archives’ ongoing work in support of U.S. Government efforts to
preserve these materials. Located in the Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, “Discovery and Recovery” is free and open to the public and runs through January 5, 2014. In both English and Arabic, the 2,000 square foot exhibit features 24
recovered items and a “behind the scenes” video of the fascinating yet
painstaking preservation process. This exhibit marks the first time these items have been on public display.

Background

On May 6, 2003, just days after the Coalition forces took over
Baghdad, 16 American soldiers from Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, a
group assigned to search for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons,
entered Saddam Hussein’s flooded intelligence building. In the basement,
under four feet of water, they found thousands of books and documents
relating to the Jewish community of Iraq – materials that had belonged
to synagogues and Jewish organizations in Baghdad.The water-logged materials quickly became moldy in Baghdad’s intense
heat and humidity. Seeking guidance, the Coalition Provisional Authority
placed an urgent call to the nation’s foremost conservation experts at
the National Archives. Just a week later, National Archives Director of
Preservation Programs Doris Hamburg and Conservation Chief Mary Lynn
Ritzenthaler arrived in Baghdad via military transport to assess the
damage and make recommendations for preservation of the materials. Both
experts share this extraordinary story and take you “behind the scenes”
in this brief video
[http://tinyurl.com/IraqiJA]. This video is in the public domain and
not subject to any copyright restrictions. The National Archives
encourages its use and free distribution. Given limited treatment options in Baghdad, and with the agreement of
Iraqi representatives, the materials were shipped to the United States
for preservation and exhibition. Since then, these materials have been
vacuum freeze-dried, preserved and photographed under the direction of
the National Archives. The collection includes more than 2,700 Jewish
books and tens of thousands of documents in Hebrew, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic
and English, dating from 1540 to the 1970s. A special website to launch
this fall will make these historic materials freely available to all
online as they are digitized and catalogued. This work was made
possible through the assistance of the Department of State, National
Endowment for the Humanities, and Center for Jewish History.The Jews of Iraq have a rich past, extending back to Babylonia. These
materials provide a tangible link to this community that flourished
there, but in the second half of the twentieth century dispersed
throughout the world. Today, fewer than five Jews remain.

Display highlights include:

A Hebrew Bible with Commentaries from 1568 – one of the oldest books in the trove;

A Babylonian Talmud from 1793;

A Torah scroll fragment from Genesis - one of the 48 Torah scroll fragments found;

A Zohar from 1815 – a text for the mystical and spiritual Jewish movement known as “Kabbalah”;

An official 1918 letter to the Chief Rabbi regarding the allotment of sheep for Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year);

Materials from Jewish schools in Baghdad, including exam grades and
a letter to the College Entrance Examination Board in Princeton
regarding SAT scores;

A Haggadah (Passover script) from 1902, hand lettered and decorated by an Iraqi Jewish youth ; and

A lunar calendar in both Hebrew and Arabic from the Jewish year
5732 (1972-1973) - one of the last examples of Hebrew printed items
produced in Baghdad.

The plan is to exhibit the material and then send it to Iraq. Not
return it because there's no way to return it. Who would you return it
to? To the Iraqi government which spied on the Jews and stole this
material? No, that government's history.

Why would you return them to Nouri's government? Where are the Jews in Iraq?

This is their property and their cultural heritage. We've made that
argument here for years. It upsets some. Tough. That is not "Iraqi"
property. It is Jewish property. The Jews have fled Iraq or been
killed off in Iraq since 2003. You allow a people to be targeted and
you think you have a right to their cultural heritage?

No, you damn well don't. The field of anthropology doesn't support
this. The social sciences do not support this. A government does not
own a group's cultural heritage. The material should be forwarded on to
Israel. That county has a very good record of taking in the Iraqi Jews
who have fled both in the last ten years and in earlier waves of Iraqi
Jews fleeing for safety.

Harold Rhode, who worked as an analyst for the Pentagon for 28 years,
is incensed by the decision after he risked his life to recover the
artefacts from Saddam’s secret police.
The 63-year-old said: “It’s a mistake. It’s like the police who come
up with something and then decide to give it back to the thief.
“The artefacts do not belong to the Iraqi authorities who stole it
from the Jewish community, who had lived there for over 2,500 years.”

Ben Cohen (JNS) offers a history of the Iraqi governments mistreating the internal Jewish population for decades and notes:

The archive of books,
photographs, scrolls, writings and communal documents, including one item that
dates back to 1658, was discovered by American troops in Baghdad in 2003, as
they combed through the flooded basement in the headquarters of Saddam Hussein’s
much-feared mukhabarat, or secret
police. Lyn Julius, a London-based writer and advocate on behalf of Jewish
communities from the Arab world, has noted that the archive was seized by
Saddam’s henchmen from the Bataween synagogue in Baghdad, in 1984. If the
archive was stolen from its Jewish guardians at gunpoint, why on earth would
the State Department, which has spent millions of dollars lovingly restoring
its contents, return it to the Iraqi government? Simply because that government
has suddenly decided that the archive constitutes, as one Iraqi representative
put it, “part of our identity and history”? Or because the U.S. feels duty
bound to respect an agreement it made at the time to return the archive?

Julius and other advocates
on behalf of Iraqi Jews make a strong case that returning the archive
essentially involves restoring stolen property to those who stole it. Instead,
they say, the archive should sit with its rightful owners themselves, the close-knit
Iraqi Jewish communities spread around Israel and the countries of the West.

This would be theft and the US would be aiding in theft if it were to
hand over the trove to the Iraqi government. They have no cultural or
legal right to the trove. Government theft of property does not give
the government a legal right to the property, it just indicates how out
of control a government is and how victimized a people are.

Cultural betrayal cannot be supported by the world community. But it
has been. In the US, there has been a strong reluctance to call out the
abuse of the social sciences by the US government. We're talking about
the military's Human Terrain System which maintains its mission is:

The Human Terrain System develops, trains, and integrates a social
science based research and analysis capability to support operationally
relevant decision-making, to develop a knowledge base, and to enable
sociocultural understanding across the operational environment.

No, what they did was war on a native people, they are the trash
betraying their training and their field, bringing dishonor to
academia. Tom Hayden's called this out and David Price has repeatedly.
We first called it out in December of 2006 (see "When Dumb Ass met Dumb Ass").

The field of anthropology is not to learn about a people in order to
attack and harm them. To participate in counter-insurgency should
result in someone losing their professional accreditation. Instead, the
only 'harm' has been one woman telling George Packer that her work has
resulted in her being shunned at cocktail parties.

The new doctrine was jointly developed with academics at the Carr Center
for Human Rights at Harvard. The Carr Center's Sarah Sewell, a former
Pentagon official, co-sponsored with Petraeus the official "doctrine
revision workshop" that produced the new Army-Marine Corps
Counterinsurgency Field Manual [U.S. Army Field Manual No. 3-24, Marine
Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3-33.5, 2007]. The workshop was held
at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, onFeb. 23-24, 2006, and can be accessed here.

This is not an academic text but, in the Marine Corps' title, a
"warfighting doctrine", complete with hundreds of recommendationsranging from how to "clear, hold and build", how to use secret agents in
calling in air strikes, even advice on public speaking ["avoid pacing,
writing on the blackboard, teetering on the lectern, drinking beverages,
or doing any other distracting activity while the interpreter is
translating."The new counter-insurgency approach purports to be more civilized and
humane than conventional kinetic war. It seeks to save the population
["winning hearts and minds"] from the insurgents. It attempts to
minimize civilian casualties and avoid torture of detainees. It promotes
social programs. These no doubt were the attractions of the
collaboration for Harvard's "humanitarian hawks". The introduction to
the Manual is thoughtful and balanced, even raising questions whether
the effort can work at all. She tastefully avoids any references to the
brutal though targeted suppression necessary for the mission to succeed,
[. . .]

Again, David Price (Concerned Anthropologists) has repeatedly called this betrayal out. Here is one example of him doing so at CounterPunch in 2009:Like a mad scientist’s slime monster that will not
die in a 1950s B Movie, the Human Terrain System’s counterinsurgency
teams not only somehow remains alive in the face of extensive
devastating criticism, but the program’s existence remains firmly
publicly boosted by a seemingly endless series of uncritical mainstream
news and features stories that frame the program as America’s last best
hope to win the hearts and minds of the occupied peoples of Iraq and
increasingly Afghanistan. If this were a B monster movie, such
prolonged survival would be due to remarkable adaptive abilities, but
Human Terrain has no such extraordinary power; its success has been
guaranteed by the support it receives from the corporate media as it
fawns over HTS in a flurry of glowing formulaic profiles ignoring the
program’s fatal flaws. If this were a 1950’s B monster movie, this
situation would like finding those we depend on to open fire on the
monster shooting blanks (and feeding it table scraps) while abundant
cases of live ammo lay at their feet. The Human Terrain program embeds social scientists, such as
anthropologists, with troops operating in battle theatre settings as
members of Human Terrain Teams. These teams are part of
counterinsurgency operations designed provide military personnel with
cultural information that will help inform troop activities in areas of
occupation. Since the first public acknowledgement of HTS two and a
half years ago, it has been criticized by anthropologists for betraying
fundamental principles of anthropological ethics, as being politically
aligned with neo-colonialism, and as being ineffective in meeting its
claimed outcomes. For the most part, the mainstream media has acted as
cheerleaders for the program by producing a seemingly endless series of
uncritical features highlighting what they frame as kind hearted
individuals trying to use their knowledge of culture to save lives;
while misrepresenting the reasons and extent of criticism of the Human
Terrain program.

Slowly, criticism has somewhat emerged in the press this year. In February, Tom Vanden Brook (USA Today) reported
US House Rep Duncan Hunter was calling out the program in a letter to
Army Secretary John McHugh, maintaining that the military had lost
control of the program and was unable to effectively oversee it. Also
in February, Tom Vanden Brooks reported:A 2010 Army investigation shows the program was plagued by severe problems, including:

Team members were encouraged to maximize their pay and comp time by inflating time sheets.

Allegations
of sexual harassment and racism were made against the government
contractors who recruited and trained Human Terrain teams and a soldier
who worked in the program.

The program relied on unaccountable contractors and inadequate government oversight.

And
many commanders deemed worthless — or worse — the reports the teams
produced. In one case, the commander of a brigade combat team in Iraq
told the Army investigator that he "relied very little on his (Human
Terrain team) and viewed them as incapable and of little value. He never
looked at his team's products and believed their survey efforts
actually created anxiety among the local Iraqi populace."[. . .]In one case, a team member with military experience made a statement
under oath that the training staff at Fort Leavenworth was overwhelmed
and that problems, including sexual harassment, flowed from bad
leadership."Teams were hurriedly deployed to Iraq and
subsequently without exception failed either as a team or in the quality
of the product delivered," the statement said. "This atmosphere was
reflected in the staff's struggles in dealing with the continuous deluge
of unqualified students and severe personnel issues. ... This gross
lack of leadership and oversight sowed the seeds for the chaos and
malfeasance to come."One of those leaders, according to the
statement, was "one of the worst misogynists I have ever encountered in
my career." Sexual innuendo was commonplace, the official wrote. "One
woman upon giving (the trainer) a goodbye hug and peck on the cheek
received the comment, 'How about a little tongue with that next time.' "

This week Tom Vanden Brook continues to cover the scandals with the program:Several former and current members of the program told investigators
and the paper, on condition of anonymity, that they regularly filed for
hours they didn't work, taking home more than $200,000 a year and months
of comp time for little effort. The Army's internal investigation
showed that supervisors directed team members to claim the maximum
amount of overtime and comp time possible, earning them salaries topping
$280,000 and entitling them to six months paid leave upon returning to
the United States.By contrast, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel earns a salary of about $200,000.

Are we really surprised that the program is plagued with theft, sexism
and racism? These are people who can't live up to the ethics of their
own field. Why hasn't the program already been shut down? Maybe
because people like Sarah Sewall support it. That trash bragged on TV
about being able to put words into Barack Obama's mouth (see Ava and my "TV: Charlie Rose by any other name would still be as bad")
and today she serves on the Secretary of Defense's Defense Policy
Board. She also wrote the introduction to the military's
counter-insurgency manual.

Sammy will have her war if it kills her. World Bulletin reports,
"A mortar shell hit the Iraqi consulate in the Syrian capital Damascus
on Thursday, killing an Iraqi woman and wounding four other people,
witnesses said. State news agency SANA quoted a source at the consulate
as saying the shell had also damaged the building." If the embassy was
the intended target, the attacker was not the Syrian government or army.
It was Barack's beloved 'rebels' (al Qaeda). The Iraqi government has
repeatedly stated that a military action would not help Syria and would
harm Iraq. Just today, prior to the attack, Alsumaria reported
Nouri al-Maliki was again stressing the military was not an answer to
Syria's crisis, that a diplomatic solution was necessary. Bob Dreyfuss (The Nation) observes:[. . .] yesterday Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, warned that Iraq opposes arming the Syrian rebels.Zebari’s warning comes as The New York Times reports
that a big chunk of the so-called “moderate” Islamist rebels inside
Syria formally broke ties with the phony, US-backed National Coalition
of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. That decision vastly
complicates President Obama’s ability to lobby on behalf of the Syrian
opposition. Recognizing the problem, a US official told the Times, using circular reasoning, that the United States has “extreme concerns about extremists.”During an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York,
Zebari endorsed the US-Russian effort to reach an accord on Syria’s
chemical weapons, and he called for a “peaceful settlement” of the
Syrian civil war. There is, he said, “no hope of military victory” for
either side. But, in a message clearly aimed not only at the United
States but at Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, Zebari said: “We
oppose providing military assistance to any [Syrian] rebel groups.”

When the US Ambassador to the United Nations isn't screaming for war on
Syria, she's still trying to destroy Iraq. The White House released
the following:

The White House

Office of the Vice President

For Immediate Release

September 25, 2013

Readout of Vice President Biden’s Meeting with Vice President Khudheir Al-Khuzaie of Iraq

Vice President Biden met in New York today with Iraqi Vice
President Khudheir Al-Khuzaie. The two discussed a wide range of
bilateral and regional issues. Vice President Biden praised Vice
President Khuzaie's national dialogue initiative. They discussed efforts
by Iraqi leaders to reach agreement on important outstanding issues,
including the passage of a new election law. Vice President Biden
offered his condolences for the families of Iraqis killed in recent
terror attacks and reaffirmed America's commitment to support Iraq in
the shared fight against terrorism under the Strategic Framework
Agreement. They also discussed Iraq's ongoing initiatives to strengthen
relations with its Arab neighbors and Turkey.The meeting included United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari.

For some reason, Stinky Power didn't Tweet about that. Maybe she was being fumigated?

That must have been an interesting conversation. Nouri al-Maliki, prime
minister and chief thug of Iraq, is the one leading the objection to
the election law. The western press has refused to cover the story.
Among other things, Nouri and his supporters are insisting that his term
be extended for eight months (which means delaying the elections).

Why does Nouri insist he needs an eight month extension? Because
parliamentary elections last took place in March 2010. Normally, the
prime minister-designate would be named by April 2010. But Nouri wasn't
named prime minister until November 2010. For this reason, Nouri
insists his term be extended eight months.

Now the reality is that in March 2010, Nouri's State of Law came in
second to Iraqiya. That meant the prime minister-designate should have
been Iraqiya leader Ayad Allawi.

Nouri demanded a recount. He got it. Iraqiya still came in first. So
Nouri refused to step down, dug in his heels and created an eight
month political stalemate that was only ended by the US-brokered Erbil
Agreement which said 'screw the Iraqi people and their votes, screw the
Iraqi Constitution and screw democracy, let's just give Nouri a second
term.'

So having gotten a second term he did not earn, he now wants to insist on eight more months.

Cleric and movement leader Moqtada al-Sadr's the one leading the push
for Parliament to pass the election law on the Shi'ite side (in Iraq,
the law is passed before each election or the elections are not held).
And the one saying no? Members of Nouri's political slate (State of
Law) and Nouri's political party (Dawa). Guess what group Khudheir
Al-Khuzaie? Right. All Iraq News reports that the vote on the election law did not take place today and was postponed until Monday. Alsumaria quotes an unnamed source stating that there are disagreements about the electoral system and the quota system.

Let's turn to the topic of the economy in Iraq. Unemployment remains high. Yet World Bulletin reports,
"The number of workers sent abroad by Turkish Labor Agency (ISKUR)
reached 38.061 in 2013's January-August, 11,054 employed in Iraq, where
Turkish construction business took in charge of 114 projects. The
number of workers sent to Iraq increased 12 % in the first eight
months of 2013 and reached 11,054 where the number was 8,854 in 2012's
same period, statistics of ISKUR said." As workers continued to be
imported into Iraq (from Turkey, India, the Philippines, etc.), Dar Addustour reports
80 workers are about to be put out of work. An al-Muthanna market is
being shut down to be replaced by a mosque. In one of the few smart
moves Nouri has made, Dar Addustour reports
a new program which will allow military doctors who served under Saddam
Hussein to return to work if they want to. That's good news. There is
a severe shortage of doctors and nurses in Iraq.

The government of Iraq continues to snap up American defense
products, and is now adding advanced robots that American soldiers are
currently using in combat to its arsenal.
On Sept. 26, robot maker QinetiQ North America announced that it had
inked a $20 million deal with Baghdad to acquire its Talon IV ‘bot, a
deal which the company says includes spares and training.
The company has already sold 4,000 variants of the Talon worldwide,
and the ‘bot is designed for use with explosive ordnance disposal teams.
Deliveries are expected to be completed to the Baghdad government by
March 2014.

Alsumaria adds that the Kurdistan Regional Government has purchased 12 security helicopters from the United States. Saturday
the KRG held provincial elections. Exit polling places the
Kurdistan Democratic Party (led by KRG President Massoud Barzani) in the
lead. The surprise from the polling is that the other dominant
political party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, is no longer
dominant. Second place, according to the exit polling, has gone to
Gorran (Change). The Independent High Electoral Commission has still
been unable to release the vote totals. Only three provinces voted. It
shouldn't be that difficult. Here are some of the latest Tweets on the
election:

Instead of focusing on Ending
Poverty in California and an EPIC push for funding and expanding everyone’s
access to high quality education as a human right to reduce the inhumane
conditions that are fueled by profound over-crowding in the 33 state prisons
operated by California, Jerry Brown wants to reward his large campaign donors
by giving almost one-billion dollars of the state surplus to the prisons for profit
industry.

There is a deep disconnect in
a state that spends over 60k per prisoner/year and less than 9k per K-12 student/year.

Below is a chart of spending
on prisons and schools from California Budget Project (cpb.org):

California Gubernatorial
Candidate with the Peace and Freedom Party Cindy Sheehan made this statement: “A Cindy Sheehan administration would make
dramatically increasing funding for education and eliminating poverty in our state a high priority to reduce the
future need for 33 state prisons with horrendous over-crowded conditions. But, in the short
run, 44% of our current prison population has been deemed at no risk for
recidivism and most of these inmates can be released with little to no harm to
our communities instead of being forced into the scandal ridden ‘prison for
profit’ system.”

Sheehan continued: “I want to live in a state where human need
is elevated over corporate greed and I am the candidate who can accomplish that
because my allegiance belongs to the people of this state and I will accept no
campaign contributions from crooked corporations like GEO CORP or Corrections
Corp of America.”

Cindy Sheehan can be
reached at:
Cindy@Cindy2014.org

For more information
on Cindy Sheehan’s EPIC (End Poverty in California; End (the use of) Petroleum
in California) Campaign, go to the website:

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About Me

I'm Michael, Mike to my friends. College student working his way through. I'm also Irish-American and The New York Times can kiss my Irish ass. And check out Trina's Kitchen on my links, that's my mother's site.